Hi folks,

I hope you’re all hav­ing a great week and your port­fo­lios are going strong. The mar­kets have been skit­tish this week thanks to Trump’s new tar­iff threats but, now that those have been TACO’d, we seem to be back to nor­mal. But hey, who knows what the week will bring?

All the Best,
Cam

QAV MYTH KILLERS

Bitcoin: The Investment That Isn’t

The Pitch You’ve Heard a Thousand Times

Bit­coin is dig­i­tal gold. A hedge against infla­tion. The future of mon­ey. If you don’t own some, you’re miss­ing out on the oppor­tu­ni­ty of a life­time. The suits on CNBC say it. The cryp­to evan­ge­lists on Tik­Tok say it. Hell, there are ETFs for it now, which appar­ent­ly means it’s “real.”

Why It Sounds Good

Look, I get the appeal. Cen­tral banks are print­ing mon­ey like it’s going out of style, infla­tion is eat­ing away at sav­ings, and tra­di­tion­al invest­ments feel… bor­ing. Then you see some­one turn $10,000 into $40,000 in a few months, and sud­den­ly your sen­si­ble index fund feels like a waste of time. The FOMO hits hard.

The Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

Here’s the uncom­fort­able ques­tion: What is one Bit­coin actu­al­ly worth?

Not “what’s it trad­ing for today?” Not “what could it be worth if every­one adopts it?” But what is its intrin­sic val­ue right now?

With a stock, you can look at earn­ings, cash flow, assets. With a bond, you’ve got inter­est pay­ments and a matu­ri­ty date. With real estate, you can cal­cu­late rental income. These things pro­duce some­thing. They have frame­works for val­u­a­tion.

Bit­coin pro­duces noth­ing. It sits in a dig­i­tal wal­let. Its only val­ue is what some­one else will pay for it tomor­row.

As of today, one BTC is trad­ing around AUD $131,893. Eight days ago? $145,064. A cou­ple months back? $184,574. For some­thing mar­ket­ed as a “store of val­ue,” that’s a pret­ty wild ride.

The Scarcity Sleight of Hand

The main defence you’ll hear is “lim­it­ed sup­ply.” There will only ever be 21 mil­lion Bit­coin, there­fore it must be valu­able.

But scarci­ty alone does­n’t cre­ate val­ue. There’s a lim­it­ed sup­ply of signed pho­tos of my high school band “The Rhythm Pigs” (for sale if you get in quick), but I’m not pitch­ing them as an insti­tu­tion­al asset class. Some­thing can be both rare and worth­less.

The only argu­ment any­one real­ly makes for Bit­coin is that it will be worth more lat­er because… well, because it will be. That’s not an invest­ment the­sis. That’s hop­ing you’re not the last per­son hold­ing the bag. It’s a vari­a­tion of the “Greater Fool The­o­ry” (pop­u­larised by Bur­ton Malkiel, an eco­nom­ics pro­fes­sor at Prince­ton, in his 1973 book ‘A Ran­dom Walk Down Wall Street’). In sim­ple terms: you can make mon­ey on an over­priced piece of garbage as long as there is a greater fool will­ing to pay even more for it than you did.

The Real Cost

The mon­ey you might lose on a 40% draw­down is one thing. But there’s a deep­er cost: the psy­cho­log­i­cal toll of own­ing some­thing you can’t val­ue.

When you don’t know what some­thing is actu­al­ly worth, you have no anchor. No ref­er­ence point. You’re just watch­ing a num­ber go up and down, try­ing to guess when to get out, paral­ysed by the fear that you’ll sell right before it moons.

And here’s the thing that should both­er you: if Bit­coin is real­ly head­ing to $1 mil­lion or $10 mil­lion with math­e­mat­i­cal cer­tain­ty, why are insti­tu­tions sell­ing it at $145k? Why are the same peo­ple pump­ing it also dump­ing it? Maybe because they under­stand some­thing the retail investors don’t.

A Different Approach

Char­lie Munger called invest­ing in Bit­coin “it’s like some­body else is trad­ing turds and you decide ‘I can’t be left out’.” War­ren Buf­fett said he would­n’t buy all the Bit­coin in the world for $25. These weren’t emo­tion­al reac­tions — they were obser­va­tions from peo­ple who’ve spent their lives fig­ur­ing out what things are actu­al­ly worth. They had dis­ci­pline and log­ic behind their invest­ing strat­e­gy.

Real invest­ing isn’t about guess­ing. It’s about hav­ing a process — a way to deter­mine if some­thing is cheap, fair­ly priced, or expen­sive. If you can’t run that cal­cu­la­tion, you’re not invest­ing. You’re spec­u­lat­ing.

There’s noth­ing wrong with spec­u­la­tion if you know that’s what you want to do with your life. But let’s not con­fuse it with seri­ous invest­ing.

STOCK ANALYSIS OF THE WEEK

For edi­tion 206 of my week­ly Aus­tralian Light mem­ber email this Mon­day, I did an analy­sis of MLG Oz Lim­it­ed (MLG). Aus­tralian Light and Club mem­bers can read it here.

For edi­tion 5 of the U.S. Light mem­ber email, I did an analy­sis of AMTD IDEA (AMTD). U.S. Light and Club mem­bers can read it here. We’re also talk­ing about it in more detail on the U.S. episode this week. It’s a com­plete­ly bonkers sto­ry!

On the full Aus­tralian pod­cast this week, Tony did a deep dive on Stan­more Resources (SMR). See the pod­cast link down below if you want to lis­ten to his analy­sis.

BUY LIST

Each week, we pro­duce a buy list based on our val­ue invest­ing sys­tem that we share with our QAV Club mem­bers. The intend­ed pri­ma­ry pur­pose of this buy list is for club mem­bers to use as a ref­er­ence for com­par­ing their own buy list. In the­o­ry, all of our buy lists should look pret­ty sim­i­lar each week.

Below is a link to the AU list for this week:

QAV Aus­tralian Val­ue Invest­ing Buy Lists 2026-01-17

Below is a link to the US list for this week:

QAV Amer­i­can Val­ue Invest­ing Buy List 2026-01-20

PORTFOLIOS

We com­pare our per­for­mance to what we think is the most rel­e­vant bench­mark (SPDR 200 in Aus­tralia, S&P500 in the USA), but if you’re new to invest­ing, these com­par­isons might not mean much. Instead, you can com­pare our per­for­mance to the top-per­form­ing Super Funds in Aus­tralia.

AUSTRALIAN

QAV DUMMY

Five Year Report: Over the last five years, our port­fo­lio is +17% p.a. vs the bench­mark +9% p.a.

Month­ly Report: The AU Dum­my Port­fo­lio was +1.39% p.a. for the last 30 days vs the bench­mark +0.92% p.a.

No trad­ing in that port­fo­lio this week.

For the 2026 FY, our port­fo­lio is +23% vs +6% for the index — near­ly QUADRUPLE MARKET.

QAV LIGHT

In the last 30 days, the Light port­fo­lio was +4% vs the index which was +3.7%.

Our most impres­sive return for the last 30 days is infra­struc­ture con­trac­tor DUR which is +18% for the month. We’ve owned DUR since 14/11/2022 when we bought them at $0.505. The price is now $2.120, so that’s a love­ly triple bag­ger.

For the last 12 months, the Light port­fo­lio is +42% vs the index +11%, rough­ly QUADRUPLE MARKET.

Since incep­tion (Feb 2022), the Light port­fo­lio is +22% vs the index +11%, dou­ble mar­ket, right on tar­get.

Become a QAV Light Member today and start your investing on the right track

If you want to find out what we’re trad­ing in QAV Light each week, sign up to become a mem­ber. You’ll get an email from me every Mon­day let­ting you know what we’re buy­ing and sell­ing in that port­fo­lio. You can choose to copy our trades or not. It’s the eas­i­est way to start your rules-based invest­ing career… and you don’t even need to know the rules. I’ll fol­low the rules for you. It’s a good first step to even­tu­al­ly becom­ing a QAV Club mem­ber and learn­ing how to run the sys­tem by your­self.

AMERICAN

QAV DUMMY

Since incep­tion (Sep 2023), our port­fo­lio is +92% vs the S&P 500 +55%.

Our U.S. port­fo­lio for the last 30 days was +17% vs +0.6% for the S&P 500.

No trades this week.

QAV LIGHT

I recent­ly start­ed our U.S. Light port­fo­lio, and it’s had a rocky start (aka Trump’s “SELL AMERICA”), cur­rent­ly ‑3% vs the S&P 500 ‑0.04%.

THIS WEEK’S EPISODES

QAV AU 903 — Nobel Prizes and Neg­a­tive Sen­ti­ment

## Fly­ing at Bus Prices: Volaris (VLRS) – QAV AMERICA 35

STOCK NEWS AND UPDATES

COMMODITIES

The only change this week was Zinc which became a Buy.

DISCLOSURE

Please review our trad­ing and dis­clo­sure pol­i­cy.

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That’s it for the week!

QAV A GOOD SHAREMARKET!

Got a ques­tion? [email protected]